What exactly is a Blog?

We have all seen blogs on internet, it is one of the most popular sources of information today that people are browsing and loving it. But there are few that are still unaware about the whole phenomena. A blog is also a truncation of the expression ‘weblog’, but primarily itis an informational or discussion site that was published on the World Wide Web. The web page consisted of discrete entries called the “posts”that were typically displayed in reverse chronological order. A blog was usually a work of one single person that was until the year 2009.Though sometimesa small group of people often worked on one single subject, but in the later years “multi-author blogs” or MABs have developed. This is done with posts & content written by a lot of professionally and authors and the posts are edited by professionals. Later MABs from newspapers, or other media outlets like, think tanks, universities, advocacy groups and many more similar institutions lead to an increasing numbers of blog traffic. The rise of social media like Twitter along with other “microblogging” systems helped integrate single-author blogs into societal newstreams.

The advent of web publishing tools which help facilitate the posting of content by users who use non-technical background this also fueled the growth and emergence of blogs in the late 1990s.

A majority of blogs are interactive, that allowed the visitors to leave comments and even message each other on the blogs. It was this interactivity feature that distinguished blog from other static websites. Blogging can also be seen as another form of social networking service. This is because the bloggers while blogging not only write content to post on their respective blogs, but they also end up building social relations with either their readers fellow social bloggers.

But the blog entered the mainstream in the year 2004. This was because people like news services, political consultants, and candidates began using blog as a means for reaching out. Blogging was established by politicians and political candidates to express opinions on war and other issues and cemented blogs’ role as a news source. There were even discussions that emerged on the topic debatingif the newspaper industry would benefit from a stimulus package by the federal government. Even the U.S. President Barack Obama acknowledged the emerging influence of blogging upon society. He was quoted saying that, “if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, then what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding”.

On 16 February 2011, there were more than 156 million public blogs in that existed. On 20 February 2014, there were approximately 172 millionTumblr and around 75.8 million WordPressblogs that existed world over.